I was reading the article “Destructors Considered Harmful” on DrDobbs by Andrew Koenig. Generally I agree with Andrew’s views on various programming topics but I thought I should just write down my thoughts on this particular article. I have a number of agreements and disagreements on certain points. One point that specifically sticks out especially with the new generation of dumb-down languages is that it looses the traditional power of kind of raw functionality that you can churn out from a piece of code. Of course we can all be happy with a walled garden approach if we are only implementing some business logic which does not need to actually utilize the full power of the underlying HW but instead rely on language/OS supported runtimes to do the required optimizations for them. But what happens when we start arguing against a programming concept/construct just because it requires some basic programming discipline and understanding of basic principles before one actually needs to start using it?